OK Team, we have a very important task that has disappeared. We suspect one of our team members deleted it by accident, and I know how to search for deleted tasks. I’ve searched every nook and cranny of Asana for this task, using the “deleted” filter, and any/every other filter I can think of that might turn it up, and cannot find it.
We know the name of the task. We really need to recover it.
I’m also going to have to find a way of preventing this from happening in the future. I believe I saw notes recently on a way of locking a task so that only certain people are allowed to mark it complete, I’m hoping this also prevents users from deleting it, but that’s a topic for a different post.
@Matt5 - what level of account are you on? It sounds like you’ve done virtually all you can do, but if you’re on an enterprise tier, you can try creating a service account (has access to all data, including private data) and calling the search API using that account to see if someone made the task private to themselves somehow.
If you aren’t on enterprise or don’t want to try that, I think your only other option is to work with the Asana support team:
To add to what @Stephen_Li already shared: if you need to contact our support team, make sure to provide them with the following info to speed up the process:
Name of the task
Name of the project where the task was located (and if you can the URL of the project)
I did include the task name as well as a direct link to both of the projects that this task was homed in. I didn’t include the teams (two separate teams) but the link to the projects should cover that, at least you’d think.
I had a client recently with the same issue. Unfortunately, the task was permanently deleted so even Asana support were unable to recover it. I hope it’s not the case for you!
As a side note there’s been a request since 2018 that we get the ability to block anyone but “person XYZ” from deleting a task. Our data is FAR too sensitive for risky way that any user can delete a task. I’ve found this objectionable for quite a long time. I think the “mark complete” thing fits this same category. FAR too many users don’t quite grasp Asana and do something dumb that basic infrastucture could help us prevent from happening. Prevent Users from Deleting Tasks - #127 by GM-Marc
@Matt5 - it’s not a perfect solution, but have you played around with project-level permissions? If you make projects comment-only (we do this in our org), people can only complete/edit/delete stuff assigned directly to them. It doesn’t solve every case but it definitely helps us.
